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>> Facebook Thursday, stepping up efforts to combat fake news. Rolling out new tools to prevent such stories from spreading. This comes after the social network faced a backlash for failing to stop a flood of phony news articles that critics charge influenced the results of the US presidential election.

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CEO Mark Zuckerberg called that quote a pretty crazy idea, just a few weeks ago. But soon after coming up with ways to address the problem, and Thursday spelling out some details. Reuters correspondent Dustin Volz is following there story.>> So today's announcement by Facebook shows that the company is continuing to evolve its approach to fake news.

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This announcement is going to let users more easily designate content that they believe is a hoax or a fake as such. And if the independent fact checkers agree, then that content will sort of appear with a label that says that this content is disputed.>> Disputed stories will appear lower in Facebook's news feed.

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Snopes ABC News and the Associated Press will act as fact checking partners. But Thursday's move does put Facebook in a tricky spot.>> Facebook stressed that this is test that they're rolling out, that this is an iterative process that they're continuing to develop as they figure out the right balance between monitoring and policing the content on its platform and allowing its users to freely express themselves and share the content that they think is important.

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>> Already not everyone thinks this is such a great move.>> There are conservative commentators who are saying that this is a covert operation by Facebook essentially to bias itself against some conservative leaning news. This is an issue that Facebook dealt with earlier when reports emerged that contractors that were controlling its trending topics sidebar were deliberately suppressing conservative news.

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Facebook later said that that report was not accurate, but it did develop this perception among some on the conservative media side that Facebook is essentially trying to suppress conservative news, that it's favoring liberal news.>> Flagged stories will also be rejected if anyone tries to turn it into a promoted ad.